Rewinded Mind
It's interesting if you think about it... the concept of friendship. People who are close to you through to the bitter end... people who would willingly throw away everything just to see you okay, just to be with you and just to hang out. My God I miss my friends. Oh, but I guess it's kind of mean to just leave myself anon huh? My name is Jeremy Sykes. My friends often just call me Syke, sort of like that lame childhood game we used to play where we'd joke around about something and say "SIKE" to take it back. Yeah, shows how smart of a group of kids we were. But man, I really wish I could relive those days. I wouldn't trade them for the world, and what I wouldn't give to just see some of them again. Oh? Why haven't I been keeping up with them? Well, work's been a major problem but aside from that I can't really say why I haven't been keeping up with them. My friend Sarah and I just fell out of contact, Brad's been neck deep in his love of surfing, Henry is hung up at work and the last I heard from Jenny she was pretty crushed because of her decision to leave Colorado. I always used to think it was my fault that my friends and I separated, but maybe I'm missing something. Or maybe I'm not remembering this right. Memory's a funny thing y'know? You only remember things when you don't need to and when you need to say something relevant to what you need to talk about the memory slips your mind. Anyway, I guess it couldn't hurt too badly to talk about the last time I saw my friends. A little bit of reminiscence couldn't be too bad. If I could put an accurate date on our falling out started around December 25, 2009. We all had been out of high school for about a year and we all had our diplomas and doing other things with our lives. I remember the night of prom I had asked Jenny to marry me and she told me that she would. The look on her face was priceless when she said yes. Full of tears and she blushed all the way down to her navel through that really sexy dress she picked. Anyway, I got off track. Me and the gang decided to keep In regular contact by just meeting up In downtown Denver to hang out, browse the 16th street mall and be goofballs like we were in highschool. While we were there we did a lot of catching up and we even talked about one of our universally held Interests at length; Anime. Yeah, go ahead and laugh...we liked anime and we were damned proud of our hobby. Anyway, around this Christmas time we were all sitting in a Starbucks together, with Jenny clinging off my arm and talking about how wonderful the winter season was, Brad discussing how much he wished he had a girlfriend, Sarah talking about how she wanted to study law and Henry thinking about his game of Call of Duty the night prior when some strange person came by and sat next to me. She was stunning, had black hair and grey eyes. She looked oddly familiar with someone we all knew in high school and something kind of drew me to talk to her despite my fiancee being right there. And there was something incredibly off-kilter about the way she talked... it was sort of like she was energetic to see me or something, but I had no memory of ever talking to her before. She said we talked before in high school but I hardly remembered anything past what our group of friends did and those ridiculous finals we had to take in our senior year. Not only that but she also seemed to be keeping tabs on each of my friends as we talked almost as If she were counting them in some strange way. I can still remember the odd undertones of how she spoke to this day, left a chill down my spine. "A'deen...dva...tri...chetyre...pyat'" I wasn't sure of it at the time but it seemed like she was numbering us in a certain way...with me being this "pyat' ". I could take that out of context it was probably the number five considering that she always pointed at me last when she said it. Anyway, after our little coffee outing we all went our separate ways again, celebrated Christmas and all that jazz. I spent time with Jenny, and she informed me that she was going to be traveling to Michigan in order to see her grandparents and give them a delayed Christmas gift. I can't quite place how I felt after that. I do remember crying in my room for a long time clinging to the ring I was sure I gave her as an engagement ring but then again I could've been imagining things. At any rate, for some reason she never came back to Colorado and just stayed over there. I had always assumed she just found someone better than her old high school crush and moved on. "Fair enough" I thought to myself after receiving whatever news it was that made me cry in the first place and decided it was time for me to move on as well. So I allowed myself time to just heal up before taking the step to asking Sarah out to see where that went. I wasn't too keen on the idea but my parents talked me into it and so I just sort of rolled with it. I seemed to just go through the motions of what any typical relationship would go through. We went out, had sex every once in a while and then we ended up just breaking it off at some point down the line. I believe we decided to do something adventurous with our new friend that black haired girl (who we later figured out her name was Allison). We decided to go and try looking at the ruins of Mesa Verde together through the lense of rappelling. Allison told us that she was pretty skilled with it and was willing to take us with her on her excision. She decided to come down last as she played the safety of our group. I went down first onto this dubious and narrow ledge that seemed to break off into a large overgrowth of trees and wildlife. I spotted from the ground as Sarah began her descent, but for some reason her cord just broke. My harness was still attached and so as she fell I gripped her hand and I was the only one that was supporting her weight at that point. I never looked up at the above rock face, but as I looked down at Sarah, I noticed that rocks of varying sizes kept falling onto her face and eyes, causing her to bleed out of one eye and If I noticed it right cave in her skull. She let go of my hand and fell into the gorge below as I was hoisted back up onto the ground where I had initially climbed down with Allison breaking down into a fit of tears telling me how dangerous that could have been and how bad it would have been for her If I had died. I found it a bit strange at the time that she didn't seem occupied by Sarah's death and only my own safety. After the accident and service, things got to be unstable for me and my friend Henry. He blamed me for Sarah's death. I didn't have an answer for him, I just kept drinking to stave off how awful that whole scene was. Rocks falling on her face, and me having to watch as she fell a little over a hundred feet down. He blamed me, blamed me because we couldn't find her body. And then he hated me because I had taken away the only girl he ever found a proper love in. I countered that he never even had the gall to even talk to her by himself until we met. We got into a fight but Allison and Brad broke it up. He had bruised up my face pretty hard that day. The day after our fight I saw in the local news that a man had been found hung in his cubicle at the 410 downtown. That was where Henry had worked as an intern for some firm. The only thing they had found at the scene was his body, and a hastily scrawled note detailing how bad he felt for hitting me, and how he could never be complete without Sarah so he... Well, needless to say, I went into an even greater depression with me, Allison and Brad all just kind of hanging out together trying to sort things out a little bit. We all went surfing in Hawaii, and had a blast. I even managed to get the hang of it and get Allison onto one of the surfboards. The only strange thing I found on the return trip home was the fact that Brad wasn't with us. We had gotten a note saying that he had met some "Hawaiian hottie" and wanted to stay behind. Something was odd about this note though. He may have loved surfing and being funny but he wasn't a "frat-boy Dudebro" type of guy. I began to think something was up with this strangeness so when we got back to Denver I began to do some research and sure enough in Hawaii there was reports that a man was found buried neck deep in the sand. He died from drowning. It never said in the article but I knew it was Brad. It just seemed too convenient. And why was it that Allison was so eager to just sit by and watch this as it happened? I didn't care. She was the only comfort I had and she was the only person I knew was even around to offer me support so I should never have done what I did. I went to her for comfort sex and even asked her to be my girlfriend. I needed someone, anyone to fill that void in my heart. How could she have just left me? It didn't seem real at all. What happened to her? Was she even still alive?! I couldn't even begin to remember. I felt so helpless and alone that I needed to feel something again, and I may sound stupid or irrational but I turned to Allison for my support. We stayed a couple for a good two years, I had never even popped the question. I had still been feeling melancholic about the deaths of four of my closest friends and the loss of my fiancee before that. It was too much to take. I smoked, I screwed, and I tried to move on goddamn it. But nothing I did worked in the end. I was already manically depressed, and having flashbacks about Sarah and Henry... seeing their cold lifeless bodies in those wooden boxes about to be put into the ground. It was too much. But that wasn't the icing on the cake! Oh no... One evening I had decided to take Allison out downtown to lodo (lower Downtown) for a nice evening, a nice dinner and then I'd ask her to marry me. I had gotten close and now seemed to be the appropriate time. Better now than never, I thought. But it felt like I was being followed by someone... someone familiar. So when our evening was over I had taken her to Sloans Lake Park where a full moon was out (yeah, I was real fucking smooth back then). And in the middle of the end of the evening moonlit stroll I knelt in front of her and was about to ask the question when I heard the following; "You're pitiful. How dare you even try to go with that bitch..." When I turned around I thought I was going to have a heart attack. Standing in front of me seemed like a distorted, perverted version of the girl I once called Jenny. She had a long dress on that barely concealed her gnarled features. She had scratches and bite marks all along her neck and back and it looked like her left eye was bashed in with something. She was holding a broken piece of bottle as she walked right past me and took a swing at Allison. The fight itself was awful. Both women fighting over different reasons and both destroying each other. The most horrible part was seeing Allison screaming something out while she was ramming the broken bottle into Jenny's throat over and over again. And when that bottle wasn't of any significant use, she began to stomp on her until only squelches were heard. When I mustered the energy to stand I stared at Allison in disbelief and all I could muster out was a "why?". Her answer horrified me. "Because in highschool I loved you... but you wouldn't look at me oh no. You liked her. I knew that I should have done more than just try and bludgeon her with my textbooks. Well, it doesn't matter to me anymore. I've gotten rid of them all, there's nothing in our way anymore. You can keep going with what you were going to do." I could only stammer out a "no" which horrified me even more than what I had said next. I was about to marry a killer... a murderer. Someone who caused me all that grief and for what? Some stupid passion or grudge she held against me!? I honestly dIdn't know at the time what that was. I said "no" in a stronger tone, then knelt by the body of Jenny, drenched in blood and destroyed by what that girl had done to her. That was when Allison took what was left of that bottle she had kIlled my Jenny with and dragged the sharp end of it across her neck. I couldn't move and I didn't have the will to. I stayed there until it was morning and before I blacked out I heard only three things; AllIson's crazy laughter fading away, my own sobs, and sirens. Despite all that, I still wish I could see them again y'know? They used to visit me every night when I would close my eyes. They would tell me stories, we would talk and visit again just lIke the good old days, right in that Starbucks in downtown Denver. But ever since those weirdos in white coats began sticking me with needles and electrodes trying to fry my head before I go to sleep, my friends stopped coming. I guess it's because Jenny was crushed about leaving me here in Colorado, Brad's neck deep in his hobby of surfing, Henry hung up at work and me and Sarah fell out of contact. I hope they get back to me soon. I want to know how they're doing. Category:Mental Illness